A Report On My Get-Out-The-Vote Trip To Vegas With Western Representation PAC & DustinStockton.com (18 Pictures)

Western Representation PAC: and Dustin Stockton.com were doing a final get-out-the-vote push in Nevada before the election. They offered to fly me out to Sin City to help and since I’d never been before, I thought it was a great opportunity to see the town and hang out with some friends while we helped out in a crucial swing state.

I arrived in Vegas on Friday and super activist Tiffiny Ruegner volunteered to give me a tour of Vegas strip.

Of course, there were the hotels and casinos that even those of us who’ve never been to Vegas have heard of before.

The water show at the Bellagio.

I also got a feel for the city. In some ways, it’s similar to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. After all, they’re both gaudy tourist towns. However, while Myrtle Beach is geared towards the poor and middle class, Vegas is for high rollers. It’s very big, very showy and very expensive. The food and drink in the casinos is marked up to movie theater prices and tickets for most of the shows run $70 for the cheap seats. Sadly, Penn and Teller had a little down time, so I didn’t get to catch their gig. On the other hand, there were always seats available for Carrot Top (Just kidding. My policy on Carrot Top is “Not now, not ever”.)

The people in Vegas are a real cross-section of humanity, too. There are a lot of visitors from other countries, people dripping with wealth, hot women in short skirts, sleazy looking gambling junkies and everything else in between. The night life and street performers were also out in full force. Our favorite one had to be this guy.

In case you’re wondering, that guy did kick him in the nuts. HARD. Afterwards, he doubled over in pain for 10 seconds and then seemed fine. Incidentally, he told us that he makes $500-$1000 a night doing this depending upon how many drunk people there are. Given what everything costs in Vegas, kicking that guy in the junk for $20 probably seems like a pretty good deal.

Despite the fact that I was having a great time, after a long flight to Vegas on two hours sleep, I had to call it an early night.

Saturday

After lunch, Tiffiny Ruegner and I went to Mandalay Bay to check out the aquarium there. On the way, I got this shot of its pool — and, yes, it does have a beach and a bay complete with a wave machine on its hotel grounds.

The Mandalay Bay Aquarium was entertaining as you can plainly see by how excited Tiffiny Ruegner was by this fish.

Afterwards, we went to a business meeting, met up with Jacob Hawkins and headed out to fire off some weaponry. It was the first time I’d ever shot an automatic weapon and what I learned from the experience primarily seemed to be that I’m not even remotely accurate with automatic weapons.

I really liked this gun, too, although I wasn’t as accurate with it as I was with the MP5.

That night, everyone got together for dinner and afterwards, most of the group headed out for gambling, drinking and the Tea Party game of choice in Vegas: Beer pong.

Sunday

We started to get down to business on Sunday with Get-Out-The-Vote Radio hosted by Dustin Stockton.

We spent two hours encouraging everyone within the sound of our voice to show up on Tuesday to vote for Mitt Romney and Dean Heller.

Afterwards, there were burgers and cocktails along with, eventually, gambling and drinking. Of course, I’m a teetotaler and I also don’t gamble…well, I shouldn’t quite say that. I’m not really opposed to gambling, I’m just the sort who would want to read 3-4 books on the subject first and get a nice sized bank roll before I got started. Still, I was in Vegas and people DREAM of going to Vegas to gamble. So, I dropped $5 on the slot machines. I lost every time. Still, if I’d had “Gambling in Vegas” on the bucket list, I could have crossed it off after that.

Monday

While Dustin Stockton took a crew out to wave Romney signs in a high traffic area to help fire people up for Romney, I started working with a Tea Party News Network crew to prep for the next day’s show. We began by taking some pictures around Vegas with Romney/Ryan signs.

Jennifer Burke

Later that night, after some more business meetings, we headed out for dinner again.

Kemberlee Kaye, Dustin Stockton, Tiffiny Ruegner

Incidentally, only The Right Scoop’s Kemberlee Kaye would go to a place called “I love Burgers” and order SOUP. Too funny, Kemberlee!

After dinner, there was more drinking, more partying and lots of talk about the election. Everyone was excited and generally optimistic the night before D-Day.

Joining Rusty on air was the lovely, talented and hyper-competent Scottie Nell Hughes.

Yes, the Tea Party News Network had fantastic guests like Ann Coulter and Donald Rumsfeld along with reporters on scene covering races around the country, but early on, there just wasn’t that much to talk about. That’s why it was so amazing to me that Rusty and Scottie could fill 9 full hours and make it sound good. That takes a lot of talent.

Early on, the reports sounded good for Romney. We kept hearing that turnout was high and things were on track.

John Hawkins and Scottie Hughes

TPNN’s Todd Cefaratti & Dustin Stockton

Unfortunately, as the night went on, everything started to go downhill. The good news stopped trickling in, Obama started racking up swing states and the GOP started blowing key races (The worst losses of the night after Romney? Richard Mourdock in Indiana, Mia Love in Utah, Allen West in Florida (probably) and Scott Brown in Massachusetts). Nobody was crying in their beer, but the mood grew progressively more somber and disappointed as the night went on.

Afterwards, the party we had planned never materialized and the adult beverages were consumed in sadness instead of joy. I will say this much though: Nobody was giving up and sinking into depression. Although everyone at Western Representation PAC, Dustin Stockton.com, The Rusty Humphries Show, Tea Party News Network and The Tea Party.net was still absorbing the loss, there was already talk about what we could do to fight back and start to turn this around before the next election. None of us are giving up or giving in and you shouldn’t either.